Parcel Health is Proud to Join Fast Company’s Inaugural World Changing Ideas Summit
On November 19, 2025, Parcel Health will join innovators from across business, government, and academia at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. for the inaugural Fast Company World Changing Ideas Summit — a first-of-its-kind event designed to celebrate Fast Company’s 2025 World Changing Ideas, spark action, collaboration, and tangible solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges.
Fast Company’s Inaugral World Changing Ideas Summit | Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC
Think. Create. Change.
The Inaugral World Changing Ideas Summit, hosted by Fast Company in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, brings together some of the most forward-looking minds in innovation, policy, and academia and echoed in the mantra “Think. Create. Change.” The summit aims to move ideas from inspiration to implementation — fostering partnerships that turn purpose into practice.
As Fast Company describes it, “Ideas are meant to move, and the best thinking should create change.” At Johns Hopkins’ new Bloomberg Center — an interdisciplinary hub built for collaboration and discovery — participants will explore the tools, technologies, and ideas reshaping our world, from climate action to public health.
For Parcel Health, being part of this dialogue means standing alongside leaders who share a belief that innovation and responsibility are inseparable. It’s an opportunity to bring the pharmaceutical packaging conversation to a broader stage — and to demonstrate how even small design changes can ripple across entire systems of care.
An Honor and Opportunity
When our flagship innovation — Tully Tube, the world’s first paper pill bottle — made Fast Company’s 2025 World Changing Ideas List, we felt incredibly proud and honored. This recognition of our work to reimagine pharmaceutical packaging through design, sustainability, and patient-centered design reflects the beginning of a movement. The world is ready for better solutions, and healthcare is one of the last frontiers of sustainable design.
For decades, progress in medicine has focused rightly on what’s inside the bottle — the science, the molecules, the cures. But it’s time to also focus on the bottle itself — the materials that carry that medicine into people’s hands and homes.
Tully Tube is proof that sustainability and safety aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s proof that a startup can challenge entrenched norms in a highly regulated industry — and win allies across the ecosystem.
As we prepare to participate in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Summit, and getting the chance to collaborate with some of the world’s most innovative thinkers, we understand that this is much bigger than just an award. This moment is a powerful validation of what happens when design thinking meets environmental stewardship in one of the least-disrupted corners of modern life: the prescription vial. We are thrilled to take the opportunity to share our voice and ideas in this world-changing space.
The World Changing Idea Behind the Tully Tube
From the very beginning of Parcel Health, we asked a deceptively simple question:
What if the everyday pill bottle — something used by billions — could be reimagined to serve both people and the planet?
The answer became Tully Tube — a recyclable, compostable paper-based pill bottle engineered to replace the amber plastic vials that dominate pharmacies today.
Plastic vials are a quiet but massive source of environmental waste. Over 165 billion plastic medication bottles enter the waste stream each year in the U.S. alone, most of which are non-recyclable due to size, color, or contamination. Once discarded, they often end up in landfills or oceans, persisting for centuries.
Tully Tube challenges this status quo. Crafted from FSC-certified paper with a biodegradable barrier lining, it’s both moisture-resistant and child-safe — meeting the same regulatory and performance standards as traditional vials, while eliminating the need for petroleum-based plastics.
But beyond sustainability, Tully Tube was designed to make the patient experience more joyful. Where amber vials communicate illness, waste, and disposability, the Tully Tube reflects warmth, care, and renewal. Patients have described it as “beautiful,” “comforting,” and “a bottle I actually want to keep on my counter.”
This duality — design elegance and ecological purpose — is what earned Tully Tube its place on Fast Company’s 2025 World Changing Ideas list, alongside global innovators in clean energy, biotech, and circular economy solutions.
Pharmaceutical Elegance: Where Design Meets Health
At Parcel Health, we believe sustainability and elegance can coexist — that pharmaceutical packaging can be functional, compliant, and emotionally intelligent all at once.
Historically, healthcare design has focused on function alone: deliver safely, label clearly, store efficiently. Yet the objects of care — the packaging, the materials, the textures — shape how patients feel about their treatment.
The amber plastic vial, ubiquitous since the 1950s, tells a story of standardization and disposability. Its color hides the contents, its hard edges are cold to the touch, and its opacity mirrors a system often designed around efficiency rather than empathy.
The Tully Tube tells a new story. Its matte finish, gentle cylindrical form, and paper-based texture evoke calm rather than clinical sterility. It invites patients to participate in care with a sense of optimism — a small daily reminder that healing and sustainability can coexist.
This is what we call pharmaceutical elegance: the belief that design should serve both health outcomes and the human spirit.
At the World Changing Ideas Summit, we hope to add our voices to conversation about how design innovation can drive behavioral change — whether by influencing medication adherence, reducing stigma, or inspiring consumer choice toward sustainable healthcare products.
Ultra-Sustainable Design as a Systems Solution
Parcel Health’s mission is rooted in systems thinking. Plastic waste isn’t just an environmental issue — it’s a supply chain, regulatory, and public health challenge.
Each Tully Tube replaces a plastic vial, yes, but its impact scales when pharmacies, hospitals, and manufacturers adopt it system-wide. That’s why we partner closely with healthcare organizations to integrate sustainable packaging into their operational models — aligning with ESG goals, waste reduction targets, and consumer expectations for climate-conscious care.
At scale, replacing even 10% of prescription vials in the U.S. with paper-based alternatives could divert hundreds of millions of bottles from landfills annually. But the real transformation lies in mindset — helping healthcare organizations see packaging not as a cost center, but as a touchpoint for positive impact.
The World Changing Ideas Summit is the perfect environment for these conversations. With Johns Hopkins celebrating 150 years of innovation and research leadership, the event brings a legacy of rigor to the exploration of how science, business, and design can converge to drive progress.
Thinking Bigger: Collaboration at the Intersection of Innovation and Policy
Fast Company’s collaboration with Johns Hopkins underscores a crucial truth: solving the world’s most pressing problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration. No single company or sector can create systemic change alone.
Parcel Health approaches sustainability in pharma the same way — as a collective problem that spans research, regulation, manufacturing, and human behavior.
At the summit, our team looks forward to connecting with policymakers exploring new frameworks for circular healthcare systems, with researchers studying behavioral design in patient adherence, and with innovators developing biodegradable materials and zero-waste supply chains.
Together, we can accelerate the transition toward a sustainable pharmaceutical ecosystem, where patient well-being and planetary health are aligned priorities.
From Waste to Wonder: The Human Side of Change
Every innovation begins with empathy. We continue learn about the intimate a role a pill bottle can play in a patient’s wellness journey. As we gather feedback from each community where we partner, patients have told us something unexpected: that the experience of using a beautiful, recyclable container made them feel empowered. Their approach to taking a daily medication changed in a way they did not expect as well. For the first time, one patient recounted, “I did not feel ashamed of taking my prescription pill bottle out of my purse.”
For patients living with chronic conditions, amber vials can become daily reminders of illness. They accumulate on nightstands and in trash bins, symbolizing burden and waste. To them, beautifully designed Tully Tubes changed the narrative — into subtle affirmation for wellness and renewal.
This emotional resonance matters. Research shows that positive associations with medication routines can improve adherence and reduce anxiety, especially for patients managing long-term therapies. A simple change in design can have an outsized effect on behavior — and that’s the kind of human-centered innovation we champion at Parcel Health.
At the summit, we’ll share these stories — not just as data points, but as lived experiences that reveal the emotional dimension of sustainability. Because in healthcare, progress isn’t just about saving the planet. It’s about making patients feel seen, valued, and supported.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Parcel Health
Our participation at the World Changing Ideas Summit is both a celebration and a call to action.
As we continue to scale Tully Tubes through pharmacy pilots and health system partnerships, we’re focused on three imperatives:
Expanding adoption across healthcare networks, retail chains, and institutional pharmacies seeking measurable sustainability outcomes.
Advancing materials science, developing next-generation biodegradable coatings and designs that maintain pharmaceutical-grade protection while reducing carbon footprint.
Educating and inspiring — through partnerships with universities, sustainability coalitions, and design organizations — to reshape how the healthcare industry thinks about packaging and waste.
In short, Parcel Health is building a future where sustainability is not a premium feature — it’s the baseline expectation.
Ideas That Move the World
Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas program has always recognized innovations that combine ambition with impact — and this year’s summit at Johns Hopkins embodies that same ethos: Think. Create. Change.
At Parcel Health, those three words define our daily practice. We think critically about the systems we’ve inherited. We create with empathy, precision, and purpose. And we commit to change — not as a slogan, but as a responsibility.
When the world’s most forward-thinking minds gather in Washington this November, we’ll bring with us a humble paper bottle that represents something much larger: a vision for healthcare that’s elegant, sustainable, and human.
Because sometimes, changing the world starts with changing what we hold in our hands.